Nigerian politicians also campaign with Google adwords

In the 70s and 80s, the TV industry seems to be the biggest beneficiaries of political campaign ads since they make a lot of money by airing political adverts before elections and those politicians paid millions for few minutes of tv commercials. Nowadays, it happens that there is a growing threat to that revenue they normally generate from political ads and this is Google adwords.

When it comes to online advertising, Google adwords is among the top platforms and definitely leads in countries like Nigeria. Google adwords is Google's advertising platform that allows people to pay for advertising on the web on a pay per click or impression basis. With Google adwords, advertisers can send their message to website users using words, pictures or even multimedia on platforms such as mobile phones, tablets and computers that make use of internet browsers.

Many Nigerians still don't really understand how advertising on Google adwords really works or how much it really costs but for the few that know, they are already using it to attract Nigerians to their business and when I say business, it's not just buying and selling but also politics.

Yes, it seems that a good number of Nigerian politicians, political parties and their campaign organizers now make use of Google adwords to attract people to support them. It's almost becoming traditional for people to win elections by simply making use of Google adwords.

Last time I noticed, prior to the 2011 general elections, the people campaigning for the incumbent president Goodluck Jonathan made use of Google adwords to promote their candidate and it was a successful campaign since he won the election against Buhari of the CPC who was his closest challenger. It is said that Buhari's team did not spend as much money on online advertising as much as Jonathan's team did.

Yes, it's possible for a Google adwords campaign to bring about a successful political campaign and it could also result in an unsuccessful one i.e. when the candidate eventually loses but the bottomline is that it at least allows the campaigners to reach more people than they usually have.

One important thing Nigerian political advertisers normally consider before putting their money into online advertising platforms like Google adwords is the profile of online users. A great majority of Nigerians who use the internet are the young and intelligent people. These are people who are at least 18 years of age to 40 and are more likely to register and vote during elections and so not advertising with Google is nowadays seen as a criteria for winning elections.

The 2015 general elections are around the corner adn I've already started seeing online advertising ads for popular candidates such as Jonathan Goodluck, Ambode and so on. Funny, I;m not seeing ads for PDP's Jimi Agbaje yet and they claim to be serious about winning Lagos from the APC.

If I were to predict who's going to win what based on the Google ads that I've seen so far, I'd say on the national level, it's the PDP but for a state like Lagos, it's APC. I could be wrong. But, it does pay to spend money on online advertising if one wants to win an election in Nigeria nowadays. This is 2015 for crying out loud!